This sums up the current Tory Party – politicalbetting.com
This sums up the current Tory Party – politicalbetting.com
I walked into Conference earlier with @Nigel_Farage. He got quite the reception. I'm convinced party members would choose him as leader if they could.
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Sir Nicholas Coleridge hailed as a beacon of 'Enlightenment values' in contrast with head master who has tried to 'decolonise' curriculum
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/02/new-eton-provost-sir-nicholas-coleridge-will-restore-school/ (£££)
This is the important news. Sir Nick replaces woke lefty Lord Waldegrave who served in
Jeremy Corbyn'sMrs Thatcher's and John Major's Cabinets.Scottish Conservatives leader says he’s opened secret talks with nationalist MSPs unhappy with Scotland Government’s direction of travel
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/10/03/douglas-ross-snp-kate-forbes-greens-coalition-conservatives/ (£££)
https://twitter.com/mfphhh/status/1703502731959250945
Basically: a plan to depopulate Ukraine, deport its people to the east, and turn the country into an agrarian land, incapable of being an independent country.
It has cross-party support. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP, has long campaigned for this. So I hope it goes through.
The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
It is another reason why Russia must not win. Worse even than the implosion of the Tories is the US being forced to freeze aid to Ukraine because of the Republicans. The US - if Trump wins again - will not be a trusted partner. Indeed it may actually turn into a malign player. We will have to pay a lot more for our defence - something our politicians have not really come to terms with. Or voters.
A more workable solution would be a protection order, applied as part of sentencing, that the offender can’t enter various women only spaces. Breach that and straight back to prison the finish their full sentence.
Come to think of it, there might well be the legal framework to do such already - is there?
To this day, large chunks of the Labour Party regard New Labour as a horror best forgotten.
One pure doctrine! one pure land! one pure leader! is the fashionable cry, in politics. It is better if the party is reduced to one voter than…. Etc etc
However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.
It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily
It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely
Unless, somehow (but unlikely), the Cons can drag themselves back to at least somewhere closer to sanity they're even more sunk than they already are. Diving down the rabbit hole of narrow evermore right wing policy will put them straight down said rabbit hole for years and make them increasingly irrelevant in the public eye 👁️
Pre Poland, like all of Europe, had compulsory military service. As part of this, anyone with a degree was automatically made an officer. So killing all the officers in the Polish army was as much about killing the educated middle and upper class as anything else.
I too have had several phone changes since I started WhatsApp in 2018, yet can access all messages since my groups started.
It is really quite hard to see this as anything other than deliberate obstruction of the enquiry, against the specific ruling in the courts.
This is a scheme (admittedly not formal government policy) for destroying Ukraine as a polity forever. It proposes destruction of road and rail networks; power stations; industry and "large settlements".
A political rather than economic plan, of a drastic kind, which is why I called it a Generalplan Westen.
No doubt exploitation of mineral resources would also happen.
As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.
No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time
Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone
But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)
Is that clear enough?
A Chancellor, whose party has been in government for almost the entire saga of HS2, telling journalists that "we need to ask how costs have got out of hand".
https://x.com/boardofdeputies/status/1708977693859971577?s=46&t=rw5lNVUgmRPVyKpxfV_pPQ
There is so much to criticise Khan for, but Hall’s main problem is clearly not what he’s done, but who he is.
The issue is not just about women only spaces. It is also to prevent child abusers changing identity and getting into schools with a clean DBS check.
Currently it is for the sex offender to notify the police of a change of details. If they don't there is no separate check. What's being proposed is that any change notified to government departments (DWP etc) be linked to the DBS scheme so that whatever identity is picked they still remain on the register and still get picked up. It will not be perfect but it will be a lot better than what we have now which relies entirely on criminals being honest with the police. It does not matter what the identity is so long as it stays linked with the sex offender and is picked up by the checks which schools and others have to do.
Secondly, keeping the legal right to change gender restricted to those with a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria will provide some protection. And, finally, not all rights in the ECHR are absolute: public safety and the prevention of crime are balancing factors.
So, yes, I've found a Suella policy I support - but it is one which appears to be supported by Labour too so let's hope it goes through.
More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:
HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.
With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.
He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.
From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.
I'm still expecting a stonking Labour majority, despite Starmer's shortcomings. He doesn't really need to do anything: the Conservative Party will win the GE for him.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/03/uk-food-prices-fall-september-first-time-two-years-british-retail-consortium-figures-show
Priti Patel, the former home secretary, said any move to cancel the northern leg would be a “pretty drastic step forward”, adding: “I think there’s a lot of questions to ask about how he reached that decision. What kind of work have they done, what kind of analysis, what kind of assumptions? And have they actually gone into all the scenarios around viability?”
I almost choked on my fruit'n'fibre.
As for the Conservatives, they have survived a lot in the past. But FPTP has a nasty cliff edge in the high twenties percent. They're not there yet, but they are currently doing St Vitus' Dance near the top of Beachy Head.
And then there's the age factor. In the past "The Tories will die out" has never happened, they have always replenished. But in the past, the Conservatives have always had fairly solid minority support in younger demographics. This time, they don't.
I reckon that, if they lose next time, they have two terms to sort it out. Otherwise, there won't be a party to save.
An important point here is where the donor money is heading. Some prominent withdrawals from the Tories, plus I suspect a lot of the campaigning, marketing, and comms strategy talent in CCHQ has suffered a brain drain (nothing from the last 12 months can suggest otherwise).
Energy and GOTV will likely be weaker among the Blue activist base too (not least because it’s hard to go door-knocking from a bath chair, or it could involve such woke things as using feet to get around) - as we know, this can make a difference in marginals.
All of this has huge cost. We're burning so much more cash than any other high speed line in Europe because of the uniquely British way we're building it - stupidly.
She is different enough to be interesting and have ideas; she’s political enough to see the need for centrism in some areas
But she’s also a bit of a blank slate. I might be projecting. Need to see more of her to know
Its like when Sunak announced he was banning the meat tax. That the meat tax was a policy proposal made by his own government earlier this year seems to have passed him by. And now other ministers trying to pass off the Tory policy as a Labour policy.
Perhaps Labour have been in power all along, the shadow government in control of the government which other Tory MPs are now referring to. Even more sinister is that Sir Keith Donkey was apparently running the country before he was an MP.
Hunt might well ask how costs "got out of hand".
As an aside, it would have been good had we heard more from these characters at the inception of the project. Though those involved in bidding would no doubt be gagged by "commercial confidentiality" - a concept that government regularly invokes to prevent scrutiny of public projects.
Trump-Biden is a dismal choice. But it looks very likely to be the choice. So, taking it as read that AN Other would be preferable, on both sides, who do you go for?
You can vote against one of them. Who do you want to fire your one bullet at?
My husband has voted Tory in the past though has since moved to the Lib Dems and Greens on local matters. He works with the local Tories on civic matters and while he likes some of them on an individual basis he thinks the party as a whole is just batshit and simply not worth voting for. Even our retired colonel and lady wife in the village are fed up with them. If the party cannot persuade people like them - traditional conservatives - to vote for them, they're done for. It's not just the batshittery that's putting them off; it's the impression that they can't put their own socks on without help. That's probably much more damaging.
Incidentally, I'm being urged to become an independent councillor for the town. But I suspect this might be like leaping into a bath of nettles with no clothes on.
Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.
All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
However Trump is the SHORT term threat to western security, and if your choice is to shoot one of two dangerous Bully XL dogs then you shoot the one that’s closest to biting your head off. In this case, that’s Trump
Who can forget that amazing PPB in that election campaign. Rishi Sunak, on the lady's doorstep like in Love Actually, going through his message cards saying "I'll stop 20mph speed limits"
To be committing fraud on matters of fact, not subjectivity, absolutely should be taken to court.
Trump is trying to fudge this by suggesting its all subjective, but some of it absolutely is not. To have reported that the Penthouse of Trump Tower is 3x the area that it really is, is just a lie, not subjective. To claim that measuring area is subjective is just mad. This is literally maths any Maths GCSE pupil ought to be able to do, to be 3x out in a filing is fraud not subjectivity.
There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
Let’s start there
But if the Tories were to go for Nigel Farage that would achieve it.
There was always a big difference between Brexit and UKIP, even if some didn't like to admit it, there were Conservative and liberal reasons to back Brexit. But if the Tories want to become UKIP they deserve UKIP's electoral results - ie next to no MPs elected under FPTP.
And before HYUFD says it for the 1000th time, no I never voted for Farage to go to Parliament, I never would, he's utterly vile. I voted for him to be expelled from the European Parliament, that's completely different.
Which won't be the death of right wing politics. The country needs both a left wing and a right wing party, but it might be the end of the Conservatives as we know them today, which may not be a bad thing. Within a generation Canada had another Conservative government but only after they sorted themselves out and rebuilt themselves, which is what needs to happen in this country.
The hubris and arrogance of cancelling the only Northern investment while in the North and expecting gratitude from that. Its like getting spat at and being expected to say "thank you sir".
I'm absolutely livid, and I'm a right winger who doesn't even care about trains, I can't imagine how others must feel.
I think it's much more likely we just take our chances, which of course risks a calamity.
Here’s what she said when she stood for election five years ago
“In 2018, Letitia James vowed to use the law as her weapon to remove Donald Trump from office, dubbing him "an illegitimate president for colluding with foreign powers."
She boldly declared, "We believe he's engaged in a pattern and practice of money laundering. Laundering the money from foreign governments here in New York State."
"Understand that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end," she emphasized, "but we can only do it if all of you exercise the most fundamental right — the right to vote."”
She meant: vote for ME
https://x.com/kanekoathegreat/status/1708936886130217220?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
This looks like an ideologically motivated, political attack on Trump because it is. They do this the year before he stands for President? It looks bad because it is bad. Worse, as I say, it is an error
It will galvanise Trump’s support and make waverers see him as a martyr
It’s stupid because the indictments against him for electoral interference etc are already in motion and much more powerful
Given the distances involved, any cost benefit analysis would have shown it wasn't worth it.
And as you regularly remind us, it was in any event about capacity, not speed.
You spent yesterday diving with Chinese nubiles and clearly missed her candidate's speech
As an aside, in the POTUS election, the three outcomes of Trump, Biden and A N Other are virtually identical probabilities in the betting.
If he's committed fraud, he should be prosecuted for it, agreed?
Nobody should be above the law, agreed?
I can't help thinking the "cost overrun" is a feature, not a bug, and designed to provide grift for Tory donors.
It's about time we got back to the central tenet of capitalism, profit is the reward for capitalism and if you fuck up, you lose your shirt.
So, the UK is only getting 13 TR-3 jets (ZM170 - ZM182 in procurement lots 15,16 and 17) so those will be the only aircraft than can release the UK specific weapons (Spear, Meteor). The other 34 aircraft might be able to do dumb carriage but they certainly won't be able to target or release the weapon just because the software exists.
Well it turns out it had to be rushed out that day so that when Kemi had her first appearance before the Business Select Committee she had something to say on the topic. Even then she delegated most of the detailed answers to one of her officials.
That is why Kevin Hollinrake - when making his statement in the Commons - had no answers to many important questions.
PR and saving face - that's all that mattered. Not good enough, Kemi.
https://x.com/stugoo17/status/1708704450246758578?s=61&t=wWWeJB3W_ksMJK4LA1OvkA
43% Lab
31% Con
11% LD
15% Others
This’d translate to I guess about a 60 or 70 seat majority to Labour (drop that to 40 or 50 if they don’t crack Scotland); the number of Con seats I think will be defined considerably by the efficiency of LD votes.
Other countries are thousands of kilometres long.
England, especially just London to Manchester, is not. Its less 200 miles via the M1 and M6.
Keeping up with the Joneses is not a good reason to do anything, we need to do what's right for our country, and theoretically if it could be done at half the price if it was 300km instead of 400km then that would be the right decision.
But realistically the biggest cost is all the chopping and changing and lack of certainty. There should have been one set of specifications agreed, then it should have been built, no ifs, no buts and no equivocations.
Sky saying the HS2 decision is expected to be announced by Sunak in his speech tomorrow after a cabinet meeting later today
I cannot understand how on earth the conservatives have allowed this to dominate the media cycle other than abject communication incompetence
I have mixed feelings on HS2 and need to hear the explanation and alternative investments for the North but they couldn’t have handed a better gift to Labour for their conference next week
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/03/french-german-ministers-boat-trip-drinking-repair-relations/
The French sense that, unlike Angela Merkel, Chancellor Scholz cares little for their language and culture and has a “liberal” penchant that makes it hard to find common ground.
How tone deaf and stupid is he?
I do agree about Badenoch. She has the look of a helpful and knowledgeable librarian so she can't be so bad can she? I am hoping she's a Trojan horse and it's all for show and once in post she reverts to an Angela Rayner or a younger Diane Abbott character
The money would have been best spent in building appropriate through tunnels through Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds so that NPR became easy. Heck it could have been built as a loop, London - Birmingham - Manchester - Leeds - Sheffield - Derby - Birmingham - London..
The issue arose, and we would likely not be hearing about it for the last few weeks, because, as the BBC political editor said this morning, a photographer snapped some idiot going into Downing Street with a visible doc on talks between Hunt and Sunak re HS2.
Do you think the Tories should have rushed a decision in order to close down the media cycle or do you think it’s better in the long run that a decision is made (rightly or wrongly) based on talks, evidence and plans rather than “shit, the media know we are discussing it we better close it down asap with a rushed decision”?
And boy have these MPs fucked up.
Looking forward to a good insider book on this. One of my fave political books of recent years was Rawnsley’s The End Of The Party.
What was the comparative one for a 300kph track ? Massively better, I would guess.
Also I'd guess it was never done.